Sunday, November 25, 2007

I'm totally unbalanced.

One of the small things we discovered during my first battery of tests was that one of my kidneys was a bit larger than the other. It's not terribly uncommon, or anything to be alarmed at, but it could keep me from donating. The nephrologist explained that if the kidneys are too far away from a 50/50 split, in terms of their function, then he would recommend that I keep both. They wouldn't want to leave me with a small kidney, and also wouldn't want to take that smaller kidney to give to someone else. To solve the dilemma, I was given a split function test. I was injected with a small amount of a radioactive dye. After a short period of time, I was sent to radiology for some real-time monitoring of my kidneys. Based on bloodflow to and from the kidneys, they could figure out how much work was being done by both sides. Fortunately, I was a 51/49% split, and the donation was still on.

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